Movie Review: “Gangster Squad.”

When Mickey Cohen was arrested in Los Angeles, it was for tax evasion. I remember this because of LA Confidential, the terrific neo-noir where Danny DeVito describes Cohen’s criminal ring and subsequent arrest in the first two minutes. Gangster Squad, the new period action film directed by Ruben Fleischer, takes more liberties with history than Confidential did. Played by Sean Penn, this Mickey Cohen is a monstrous caricature who finds creative ways of murdering anyone who stands in his way. He’s an over-the-top villain for an over-the-top movie, one that replaces noir tradition with wanton gunfire.

It’s 1949, and LAPD cop John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) is tired of Mickey Cohen’s reign over the city. The cops and judges are in his pocket, so when O’Mara arrests Cohen’s thugs for kidnapping and attempted rape, they barely spend an hour in jail. The Chief of Police (Nick Nolte) sees potential in O’Mara, and orders him to organize a team that will hit Cohen where it hurts. O’Mara recruits five officers, including Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling), a soft-spoken guy who easily gets Cohen’s girlfriend Grace (Emma Stone) into bed. O’Mara’s other recruits have a unique skill, whether it’s knife-play or intelligence gathering. Nothing they do is entirely legal – the squad leaves their badges at home – yet they get Cohen’s attention once they ruin his heroin trade. Angry and devious, Cohen wages all-out war against O’Mara and his men.

Fleischer, who previously directed Zombieland and 30 Minutes or Less, knows how to set up an action sequence. There is an early car chase in Gangster Squad, and while it’s not entirely suspenseful, Fleischer preserves spatial coherence better than most action directors. The gun fights, which are frequent and loud, are even less exciting since the constant rat-a-tat of gunfire requires the cops and gangsters to miss a lot. There are bigger problems, unfortunately, in terms of plot and character. Written by newcomer Will Beall, the screenplay forces A-list actors into silly, one-dimensional roles. Brolin and Gosling largely emerge unscathed; Brolin is forceful and taciturn, whereas Gosling’s laconic charm makes sense for a character that is more loving than bright. Penn unintentionally veers into comic territory: his take on Cohen is unrelentingly nasty and severe, to the point where he veers himself and the movie into self-parody.

Gangster Squad references a lot of classic cop movies. The climax, for example, culminates with protracted fight scene that borrows heavily from the end of Lethal Weapon. Still, the movie that Gangster Squad most closely resembles is The Untouchables. They are about a set of cops who are impervious to bribes, and who operate outside the law in order to catch a vicious gangster. Both movies even feature a pivotal scene at a stair case. Fleischer and Beall clearly want their movie to belong in that tradition, yet its series of pointless skirmishes make it a minor entry into a genre where better filmmakers explored what motivates these men, and why. Gangster Squad is based on a non-fiction book of the same name, but it strangely abandons real life in favor of a safe, predictable ending. Why switch from the real story at all? As DeVito’s says in LA Confidential, “Something has to be done, but nothing too original, because hey, this is Hollywood.”

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Rather than pander to the purists or create music for DJs alone, Daniel Goldstein aka Lane 8 has always tread his own, distinctive path -- perhaps best summed up by

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Rather than pander to the purists or create music for DJs alone, Daniel Goldstein aka Lane 8 has always tread his own, distinctive path — perhaps best summed up by his phones-free event and label concept This Never Happened.

The concept is a simple one: remove all phones and cameras from the event, get back to connecting with the music and the people around you. And it is one that has been embraced with passion by Lane 8’s dedicated fanbase and the dance community at large. With his most recent This Never Happened tours including sold-out shows at Warsaw in New York, The Fonda in LA, and Zoo Project in Sydney, the This Never Happened message is being spread far and wide.

In tandem with the events, Daniel’s output on the TNH label has stood out for its integrity and artistry whether on emotional epics like “Fingerprint” or quirky upbeat groovers such as “With Me.” Always defined by a melodic touch, TNH is the culmination of a steady, assured rise over recent years.

After blowing up in the blogosphere with a series of Soundcloud-driven Hype Machine #1s around 2014, Lane 8 rose to wider prominence through a relationship with the tastemaking Anjunadeep label and his critically acclaimed 2015 album “Rise.”

Returning to the label with the Kidnap Kid collaboration “Aba,” 2017 will also see a steady stream of music on This Never Happened and more TNH tours the world over.

Alongside his own productions, his remixes have almost become as sought after as his originals with reworks of Maribou State’s Wallflower and ODESZA’s “Bloom.” More recently he has given RUFUS’s leftfield pop gem “Innerbloom” and Deadmau5’s iconic “Strobe” his own unique touch.

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There’s a great scene in The Last Waltz – the documentary about The Band’s final concert – where director Martin Scorsese is discussing music with drummer/singer/mandolin player Levon Helm. Helm

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There’s a great scene in The Last Waltz – the documentary about The Band’s final concert – where director Martin Scorsese is discussing music with drummer/singer/mandolin player Levon Helm. Helm says, “If it mixes with rhythm, and if it dances, then you’ve got a great combination of all those different kinds of music: country, bluegrass, blues music, show music…”

To which Scorsese, the inquisitive interviewer, asks, “What’s it called, then?”

“Rock & roll!”

Clearly looking for a more specific answer, but realizing that he isn’t going to get one, Marty laughs. “Rock & roll…”

Well, that’s the way it is sometimes: musicians play music, and don’t necessarily worry about where it gets filed. It’s the writers, record labels, managers, etc., who tend to fret about what “kind” of music it is.And like The Band, the members of Railroad Earth aren’t losing sleep about what “kind” of music they play – they just play it. When they started out in 2001, they were a bunch of guys interested in playing acoustic instruments together. As Railroad Earth violin/vocalist Tim Carbone recalls, “All of us had been playing in various projects for years, and many of us had played together in different projects. But this time, we found ourselves all available at the same time.”

Songwriter/lead vocalist Todd Sheaffer continues, “When we started, we only loosely had the idea of getting together and playing some music. It started that informally; just getting together and doing some picking and playing. Over a couple of month period, we started working on some original songs, as well as playing some covers that we thought would be fun to play.”

Shortly thereafter, they took five songs from their budding repertoire into a studio and knocked out a demo in just two days. Their soon-to-be manager sent that demo to a few festivals, and – to the band’s surprise – they were booked at the prestigious Telluride Bluegrass Festival before they’d even played their first gig. This prompted them to quickly go in and record five more songs; the ten combined tracks of which made up their debut album, “The Black Bear Sessions.”

That was the beginning of Railroad Earth’s journey: since those early days, they’ve gone on to release five more critically acclaimed studio albums and one hugely popular live one called, “Elko.” They’ve also amassed a huge and loyal fanbase who turn up to support them in every corner of the country, and often take advantage of the band’s liberal taping and photo policy. But Railroad Earth bristle at the notion of being lumped into any one “scene.” Not out of animosity for any other artists: it’s just that they don’t find the labels very useful. As Carbone points out, “We use unique acoustic instrumentation, but we’re definitely not a bluegrass or country band, which sometimes leaves music writers confused as to how to categorize us. We’re essentially playing rock on acoustic instruments.”

Ultimately, Railroad Earth’s music is driven by the remarkable songs of front-man, Todd Sheaffer, and is delivered with seamless arrangements and superb musicianship courtesy of all six band members. As mandolin/bouzouki player John Skehan points out, “Our M.O. has always been that we can improvise all day long, but we only do it in service to the song. There are a lot of songs that, when we play them live, we adhere to the arrangement from the record. And other songs, in the nature and the spirit of the song, everyone knows we can kind of take flight on them.” Sheaffer continues: “The songs are our focus, our focal point; it all starts right there. Anything else just comments on the songs and gives them color. Some songs are more open than others. They ‘want’ to be approached that way – where we can explore and trade musical ideas and open them up to different territories. But sometimes it is what the song is about.”

So: they can jam with the best of them and they have some bluegrass influences, but they use drums and amplifiers (somewhat taboo in the bluegrass world). What kind of music is it then? Mandolin/vocalist John Skehan offers this semi-descriptive term: “I always describe it as a string band, but an amplified string band with drums.” Tim Carbone takes a swing: “We’re a Country & Eastern band! ” Todd Sheaffer offers “A souped-up string band? I don’t know. I’m not good at this.” Or, as a great drummer/singer/mandolin player with an appreciation for Americana once said: “Rock & roll!”

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Overview
With its title “the green laurel” taken from a 1584 book of madrigals, this program explores the growth of Italian musical style from Renaissance to Baroque, including virtuoso instrumental versions

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Overview
With its title “the green laurel” taken from a 1584 book of madrigals, this program explores the growth of Italian musical style from Renaissance to Baroque, including virtuoso instrumental versions of madrigals and the songs themselves, as well as the new monodies of Monteverdi, Francesca Caccini, and other 17th-century luminaries. With violin, viol, lute, and soprano Jolle Greenleaf and additional special guests from Italy—instrumentalists Marcello Mazzetti and LivioTicli from the Palma Choralis Ensemble, based in Brescia in the Lombardi region of northern Italy.

Folger Consort gratefully acknowledges the kind support of our sponsors. For a full list of Consort sponsors, please visit our Sponsors page.

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Andy Borowitz is a New York Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. In 2001, he created The Borowitz Report, a satirical

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Andy Borowitz is a New York Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. In 2001, he created The Borowitz Report, a satirical news column that has millions of readers around the world, for which he won the first-ever National Press Club award for humor. The Borowitz Report was acquired by The New Yorker in 2012.

Before creating The Borowitz Report, he created the classic sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” winning the NAACP Image Award and launching the acting career of Will Smith. He has many other Hollywood credits, including the Oscar-nominated film “Pleasantville.”

His most recent books have both been bestsellers: “The 50 Funniest American Writers,” which became the first title in the history of the Library of America to make the Times best-seller list; and a memoir, “An Unexpected Twist,” a No. 1 best-seller, which Amazon named the Best Kindle Single of the Year.

His work is widely shared on social media: his Twitter feed, @BorowitzReport, has more than half a million followers and was voted the best Twitter feed in a poll by Time; his Facebook feed has over eight hundred thousand followers; and his most recent comedy video received over one million views on YouTube in its first week alone.

As a comedian, he has performed sold-out shows around the world and has made countless television and radio appearances, on National Public Radio, VH1, and Comedy Central, among other places. He has been called a “Swiftian satirist” (the Wall Street Journal), “America’s satire king” (the Daily Beast), “the funniest human on Twitter” (the Times), and “one of the funniest people in America” (CBS News’ ”Sunday Morning”).